A British scientist expelled from Belarus last week has claimed he was targeted because he spoke publicly about evidence that Russia used "rain technology" to make radioactive particles land there after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. Dr Alan Flowers, who was given 48 hours to leave the country, said 4,000 square miles of Belarus were sacrificed to ensure the safety of Moscow. He claims cold war technology was used to "seed" clouds and produce contaminated rain so the radiation would not spread as far as the Russian capital. "After the blast there was the risk that radioactive material blown into the atmosphere could have reached Moscow," said Flowers, a scientist at Kingston University London, who has carried out research in the contaminated areas for 12 years. "Sowing rain made sure that didn't happen."

It was at 1:23am on April 26, 1986, that reactor 4 exploded at the Chernobyl nuclear power station in Ukraine, then part of the Soviet Union. The blast killed 31 people but the initial death toll was low compared with the millions endangered by exposure to high levels of radiation.
In some contaminated areas of Belarus, thyroid cancers have increased by up to 1,925% and the World Health Organisation says many of those exposed to radiation as children will develop the disease. Genetic defects are beginning to appear and scientists have detected increases in lung, liver and kidney cancer following the accident.

Tons of radioactive dust particles blown into the air by the reactor explosion were carried on winds heading north by northeast towards Gomel, in neighbouring Belarus. Gomel is 26 miles from the Russian border and little more than 300 miles from Moscow. "If those clouds of radioactive material had remained within relatively narrow wind channels all the way to Moscow, the entire city could have been contaminated," said Flowers. After the first contaminated winds passed over Gomel, however, a deluge drenched the region with radioactive fallout and Muscovites were spared. According to Flowers, the Soviet military had performed the technological equivalent of a rain dance.

For decades the West had known Soviet scientists were working on "climate warfare". Some in the Kremlin dreamt of destroying American wheat prairies with torrential floods. Chemicals such as silver iodide crystals and solid carbon dioxide (dry ice) are believed to help trigger precipitation when scattered into clouds. "Soviet military data have never been made available for us to judge how successful the process is," said Philip Brown of the Meteorological Office. "But according to colleagues in Moscow, it is effective."

Witnesses' accounts suggest the process may have initiated or intensified the radioactive downpour around Gomel. A local official walking home from a wedding remembered how Soviet transport planes continually crisscrossed overhad, opening their bay doors, shortly before the rain fell. Another witness who later became a physicist recalled the planes flying overhead and described soldiers setting off rockets from the ground. "I was watching the planes and the soldiers firing their rockets into the air," the witness told Flowers. "We had no idea what they were doing but a little later rain -- black rain -- began pouring down, coating everyone and everything." In an interview with another foreign scientist, a Soviet pilot is said to have confirmed that the rain was artificially seeded. Some towns and villages hit will not be clear of radioactivity for an estimated 150 years.

During the operation, however, local inhabitants were not told to leave because they did not live within a 20-mile "danger zone" around Chernobyl; nor were they ordered to stay indoors. Flowers believes many in Belarus are aware of the facts but are too afraid to speak out. One of the country's leading researchers, Professor Yury Bandazhevsky, was arrested in 1999 after publishing data on thousands of "mildly" contaminated children with heart problems, premature ageing and weakened immune systems. Flowers has worked in the contaminated areas with little hindrance. "But during a public lecture in May I talked for the first time about the information I had gathered from witnesses on rain-seeding," he said. He was summoned to a police station, where a Belarus KGB officer and a policeman presented him with his order to leave by midnight last Monday.